Several ideas came to me as I took Tipper on a long, linear walk this morning. Ideas seem to come to me in two main places:

1) On the road, whether walking leisurely as Tipper's pawpatter urges my brain along like a metronome--at times like these the thoughts sift down from the air, from the mountains, having found on my shuffling frame a convenient receptacle--or running, when the effort and the strain wear down the thought's defenses until it is dislodged from my bowels. Accordingly, the thoughts that strike from above while walking are abstract, speculative, prospective, intellectualized, while those that rise from below as I run are more emotional, reactive, intuitive: In a word, "visceral."

2) In the tub, while I read, giving such ideas a character contingent on the thoughts of others. I read in other places, too, such as the couch and the bed, but none seems to motivate thought the way a tub filled with warm water can.

The first of the morning's ideas had to do with another expedition, more precisely the winter's crowning expedition. As I have mentioned here previously, the Nez Perce Road effectively ends 2.5 miles from my house during the winter months, where it is closed off to wheeled vehicles by a snowbank. If you are using your feet or some kind of device worn on your feet, on the other hand, the road continues some 110 miles through the largest wilderness area in these continental United States, terminating in Elk City, Idaho. What I'd like to do, if you catch my drift, is to park Nystrom's Pride in Elk City via the circuitous route open in the winter, return to the cabin in another vehicle, and then recover Nystrom's Pride by traversing the entire length of the Nez Perce Road on a set of cross country skis. Which--if I'm lucky--should take a week. It's a pretty inchoate idea at this point, but I can't see a good reason not to do it. To form some idea of the terrain and its rigors, I'm planning to cover the very first stretch of the journey on an overnight trip this weekend, that is to say the 13 miles or so to the pass into Idaho. 13 miles on a set of XC skis shouldn't be particularly grueling, and barring any unexpected difficulties it will leave plenty of latitude for speculation about still more adventures.

The next idea actually began while I was running yesterday and returned this morning in somewhat more workable form. This one concerns a story dealing with a subject of elementary importance: Justice. The thing itself, that is, as opposed to its institutionalized specter.

For quite some time my fictional work has taken place in the realm of the absurd (not to say insignificant), at the margin of human experience and pathos. To speculate on something I don't quite understand, I'd like to advance the idea that this focus on marginality on my part, as a writer, is the product of a dialectical process whereby I consciously selected marginal soil as the seedbed for my plots and characters on the strength of a conviction that the margin, that vast neglected forum where the bulk human experience and learning and suffering occurs, would yield the most fertile literary results; and where I simultaneously in effect "marginalized" myself from the very serious role that is the writer's to fulfill precisely by contenting myself with the flotsam of absurdity--at the expense of the very weighty subjects that writing was invented to address, indeed, on whose tackling, weighing and reckoning writing has a virtual monopoly.

In case that is too obscure, let me state this by way of preface to the installments that will follow here, as clearly as I am able. I believe that it is a primary function of literature to search for truth. Literature may entertain, it may titillate, it may fascinate, thrill or disabuse--it should do all those things--but the success of all such criteria can be said to emerge as a function of how successfully the writing is able to expose, emulate or approximate the truth, or at least whatever piecemeal truth the individual is capable of getting at.

If the writer is seeking merely to entertain himself, he may as well be masturbating or playing a video game. In the above sense, the truth is something obscure, a state of affairs that must be brought to light and investigated. Certain truths are more pressing than others, as a function of the historical moment in which they are hidden. And here I am far from saying that the writer's task is the straightforward one of singling out his truth, or "truth," and then going at it directly. In fact I am suggesting something like the opposite: After all, we all live with the truth right under our noses, and do not see it. No, the writer must work laterally, obliquely, clandestinely, from bitter searching of the heart, to borrow a line from that fine man Leonard Cohen. The writer must undermine the edifice of appearances and learn to deploy paradox as a weapon. Skill is necessary, but insufficient without courage. All of this is easier said than done. Very few have managed, really, to do it, just as only a few will manage, really, to do it in future. And yet it must be done. It must be. We must. The stakes are staggering, and the penalty that awaits our failure to do so is grim to the point of defying contemplation. Who will be able to pinpoint the moment in which our humanity as we have defined and celebrated it hitherto was definitively lost? Or, at the risk of obscurity: Does a dog know when it stops being a dog?

This, then, while maintaining the humility and retiring nature requisite to the task of proper vision and judgment, is the struggle to which I am struggling to pledge myself, consciously now, after years of toiling in the margins of unseasoned absurdity. I'll need all the help I can get.

Lest I leave a hole in the middle of my reasoning, let me seal it with a concluding disclaimer here, in case it wasn't clear from the foregoing, or from the sum of my Werdegang, to use a nice German word. When I say that I seek rehabilitation from the thematic margins into the main stream of literature's wider concerns, I mean just that, and nothing more. The farther I am from the center of our, ahem, cough, wink, nudge, society, the better. In any case, the center is a savage illusion that may be collapsing about our heads even as we read and write.

So. A story about justice. Coming soon to a screen near you. I have yet to write the first word.